Non-resilient Systems  

Just a short post tonight as I've spent most of my day sitting in taxis, planes, fogbound airports and long meetings, and thus haven't had a chance to scan anything except the papers.

The Australian has another installment in the story of our intertwined water and power systems.

THE country's largest industrial power users have blasted the federal Government for doing nothing to avoid a looming crisis, as rising electricity costs threaten the competitiveness of Australian manufacturing.

Soaring power prices mean industry has lost the global comparative advantage it once enjoyed from cheap coal-fired generation, and power costs are now rising towards the cost of nuclear power, according to the Major Energy Users Group, which represents energy-intensive industries such as steel and packaging.

The group claims profiteering by generators is artificially inflating prices. Prolonged drought has also temporarily driven up costs. The group is blaming the Government for not taking action to reform the market. "It is no longer a comparative advantage for Australian industry, and this has happened even without a price on carbon emissions," Mark Gell, group's chairman and the corporate development chief of steel giant OneSteel, told The Australian.

In March, the group wrote to both the federal Department of Industry and NSW Premier Morris Iemma complaining that NSW government-owned generators were profiteering, but neither government replied. "We have been bashing our heads against a brick wall. We aren't getting a hearing," Mr Gell said. "Until there is a crisis of some sort, you can't get government action," he said.

In the letters, obtained by The Australian, the group complains of "coincidental behaviour" by NSW generators in driving prices up. It claims that the three NSW power generating bodies need to be split into six to reduce their market power, and that the generators should ultimately be privatised to ensure competition.

Yesterday, the drought that has forced two Queensland coal-fired generators to cut back power generation claimed the jobs of 160 mine workers at Rio Tinto's Tarong mine in Queensland. The mine's only customer is the neighbouring Tarong power station, which in March was forced to reduce generation by 70 per cent. A $1.7 billion project to deliver recycled water to the plant won't be completed until 2008, and a restart is now reliant on the drought breaking.

In recent months, wholesale spot prices in the National Electricity Market have risen to about double where they would usually be.

But industrial consumers complain the increase is more than could be explained by the drought, which has cut supplies from Snowy Hydro and curtailed some coal-fired generation that depends on water for cooling. ...

While I have a tendency to be harshly critical of short sighted and greedy people, I'm pretty much at a loss for words now when I watch the Rodent and his team of clowns scurrying about trying to avoid keeping the country functioning just to keep their mates in the coal and uranium mining lobbies happy.

To recap: it seems we are now in a nasty spiral of global warming driven drought forcing both power generation cutbacks (due to lack of water to cool various coal fired plants and the lack of water to run the Snowy Hydro system) and the construction of multiple desalination plants (that require large amounts of power).

As a result, electricity spot prices have doubled this year, and the generators are cranking up the prices on forward sales contracts. Investment in new plants has largely stalled because of grass roots opposition to new coal fired plants and business uncertainty about the economics of alternatives until the issue of instituting a carbon tax or carbon cap'n'trade system is decided.

Large power users are now complaining vociferously about the electricity price gouging them and demanding the government stop the generating companies they own from "profiteering". These are of course the same people who tend to go on a lot about free markets being good every other time they open their mouths.

Meanwhile large parts of the country have various levels of restriction on water usage and people are beginning about to complain about who is having to cut back on usage and who isn't.

The federal government has reacted to all this by delaying resolving the carbon pricing issue, attempting a power grab for control of inland water allocations (without offering any solutions to the problem of lack of water), while refusing to take anything other than cosmetic steps to reduce carbon emissions and relying on the two long term mirages of "clean coal" and nuclear power to solve both the energy and emissions problems - ignoring the fact that neither will come on stream for at least a decade and both are extremely water hungry (as are the coal mines to feed one of these fantasies).

Is it just me being negative or are these guys clearly complete idiots ?

A couple of simple market signals - a carbon tax to encourage industry to emit less and some stern words (and veiled threats) about water usage and availability - would quickly encourage a wave of investment in clean energy alternatives which don't compete with people and other industries for dwindling water supplies. Is this that hard a concept to grasp ? Or is it just too inconvenient for some people to face up to ?

Of course, they probably think lots of spin will make the problem go away, and they may be right unless the "Revolt against the mushrooming forces of darkness" is successful (that's a pretty good title for an article from the Oz I must say - I wonder what some of the forces of darkness resident in their op-ed pages have to say about it ?).

THE world chortled when former US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld wove a tangled web of rhetoric about knowing what we know, knowing what we don’t know, and not knowing what we don’t know.

But hang on, this is not a laughing matter. Not knowing what we don’t know is precisely the state some governments want to keep the public in.

How else can the Howard Government’s anti-terror laws be interpreted when they make it possible for Australian citizens to be held for long periods without charge, and when reporting these events or any information relating to them is illegal?

This is just one of the many hundreds of ways that free speech is being eroded in Australia, not by the forces of evil or darkness that profit from public ignorance, but by the very governments that will say, hand on heart, that free speech is a fundamental part of our being.

The Australian media industry has, quite rightly, had enough. It wants a roll-back of the laws that are stifling it and last week it established a lobbying organisation to achieve this. Called Australia’s Right to Know, this free speech coalition will, I hope, constantly hound those in a position of power who seek to impose a mushroom culture on the public: that is, keep ‘em in the dark and feed ‘em bullshit.

It is happening at every level of society. The lobby group will keep its big guns trained on the big issues, such as burgeoning court suppressions, secrecy in policing, unworkable Freedom of Information laws that hide matters of public importance or bureaucratic bungling—or both—and whistleblower protection.

But the mushroom syndrome goes far beyond that. All governments, at every level, employ spin doctors to massage their information so that it is presented only in the best possible light. The spinners are out of control.

Reporters are no longer entitled to speak to police officers about their inquiries; they have to run inquiries past battalions of press secretaries and media advisers before they can speak to a politician or minister, and privacy laws have become a convenient bureaucratic excuse for refusing to release information.

A case in point: a newspaper request for the picture of a convicted criminal was denied by police in Victoria on grounds of privacy, because the man was dead and could not give his permission.

It gets worse. The NSW Government has refused to allow the publication of the names of restaurants fined for breaching food regulations—surely a legitimate public health issue—and the names of pubs that have the worst record of alcohol-related violence, clearly a public safety issue.

This is plain lunacy and the unhappy fact is that this suppression of information at a government level is being aped by many corporations, which put the protection of their image ahead of truth and the public’s right to know.

At all levels, the erosion of free speech has been going on for decades under governments of all colours.

Australia is falling rapidly in the lists of nations that respect and uphold media freedoms; in the Reporters Without Borders list we are in 35th place, behind Hungary, Bolivia and Bosnia, and on the Freedom House list we’re 39th, behind Slovakia, Lithuania and Estonia. In both lists, we’re also behind the US and Britain.

New Zealand rates considerably higher on both lists, as do Canada and Ireland. Can the proponents of secrecy please explain why the sky has not fallen in; why those societies that do more to encourage people to be informed are not riven by anarchy or in a state of collapse? ...

The SMH reports that lack of water has managed to cut our urban water consumption by 6%. Just think - if we empty the dams completely we'll be able to triumphantly report a 100% usage reduction next year !

Urban Australians consumed 6 per cent less water over a year thanks to restrictions and reduced supply, a national report says. Brisbane residents achieved the biggest reduction of about 30 per cent because of south-east Queensland's strict water use restrictions. At the other end of the scale, residents of Canberra used about 10 per cent more water in 2005-06 from a year earlier.

The first report into urban water utilities across Australia, produced jointly by the National Water Commission and Water Services Association of Australia, also found only 9 per cent of effluent is recycled by major providers. The report revealed the average residential water bill for the year was $582, with Melburnians paying the lowest and Perth residents the highest. Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney had the lowest water consumption per capita annually of about 75 kilolitres per person and Darwin the highest of 170 kilolitres. The average water loss among major utilities was 91.4 litres per connection per day.

Commission chief executive Ken Matthews urged all jurisdictions not to rule out the use of recycled sewerage for drinking water. "I think it's time Australia, as the driest inhabitable continent in the world, gave that serious consideration," Mr Matthews told reporters. "It is wrong in principle for governments to rule it out on policy grounds. It needs to be considered on its merits against the science evidence and the health arrangements." He called for a priority on national policy that significantly lifted rates of water recycling.

Mr Matthews also said the water restrictions seen around the country should not become permanent despite the climate becoming drier. "Restrictions do have a place but only if they're temporary. The idea of restrictions continuing for the next 300 years in Australia is not my picture of the future of water management. What we need is to ensure supply arrangements ... that are sufficient to what communities need."

The Australian Defence Force has followed in the footsteps of similar British and American studies and issued a report noting that climate change is a defence issue (and that "global guerillas" style fighting will probably be the norm in future).

THE Australian Defence Force has identified climate change as a national security threat for the first time, as it predicted the military would become more involved in stabilising failing states than fighting conventional wars. Outlining its vision for the future of the armed services to 2030, the force has also foreshadowed an era where crises flare more suddenly while its adversaries, including terrorists and insurgents, become more cunning and capable.

Launching the document - Joint Operations for the 21st Century - the Chief of Defence Force, Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, said the military faced security challenges it had not envisaged before, specifically "climate change and the impacts of global demography".

It is the first time a publicly released document from Australia's security and intelligence apparatus has acknowledged the threat.

Analysts such as Professor Alan Dupont from the University of Sydney have argued that climate change has the potential to devastate the productive land and water supply in struggling nations across the region. It risks overwhelming fragile governments, producing massive movements of refugees while unleashing civil strife and violence.

A few other articles of interest in the local press:

- apparently Arnie has to decide who he fears more - BHP or Malibu celebrities when he decides on one long running Californian LNG terminal proposal
- rising US petrol prices are forcing up our petrol prices - maybe its time for a Senate enquiry into the machinations of big oil here as well...
- Sydney is going to be locked down for the upcoming APEC summit resulting concerns about the increasing militarisation of domestic law enforcement being raise. Why don't they hold this thing on the outskirts of Canberra instead of disrupting the biggest city in the country for a week ? And if they can't manage that, I hope they'll stay on the other side of the harbour and not gridlock the north shore like the Lord of Darkness did during his little amble over the bridge a couple of months ago.
- Chatham House is saying that "War-torn Iraq 'facing collapse'". Does that mean that governments for each ethnically cleansed region (should any manage to form) will need to sign up individually to hand over their oil ?

I guess I should put in a few positive pieces, so here is some news from TreeHugger - first on the recent CNet articles on solar thermal energy.

On Friday, CNET published an article outlining the promises and challenges of solar thermal power plants like Nevada Solar One. Writer Michael Kanellos noted that solar concentrator technology has the potential to produce electricity at a rate competitive with natural gas, but still faces a number of hurdles: "The plant would also have to come with a large energy storage system, be built next to others and be located close to users. To date, no one has completed a facility that comports to all of these parameters..."

Yesterday, that article almost looked like a set-up for another one on Ausra, an Australian company that gave a presentation on Tuesday at Austin's Clean Energy Venture Summit. According to the article, Ausra claimed that it has overcome one of the hurdles mentioned above:

Ausra's twist is "thermal storage." In addition to generating steam from its array of special metal tubes, Ausra stores hot water that a power plant can draw on during times when the sun is not shining. That thermal storage is key to competing on price even at peak demand times, said Robert Morgan, the chief development officer of Ausra, who spoke on Tuesday.

The company's system, which is now testing in Australia, can operate at 10 cents per kilowatt hour for plants between 100 and 200 megawatts. For plants between 100 and 500 megawatts, the cost goes down to 8 cents per kilowatt hour, said Morgan. That means they can compete with existing natural gas plants, which operate at 12 cents per kilowatt hour, he said. "With thermal storage, we can compete with coal on price," he said. Coal-fueled plants are typically the cheapest sources of power.

Ausra also disclosed it's got some major backing: VC firms Kleiner Perkins and Khosla Ventures have both invested in the company.

The storage issue would seem to be the biggest challenge to overcome to bring solar thermal power in line with fossil fuel sources. While Kallenos notes issues with siting plants (particularly permitting processes than can drag on for years), we're guessing that the promise of competitively-priced clean energy will help tremendously there.

And one from WorldChanging, also from the Austin Clean Energy Venture Summit on "The Utility of the Future".

Austin's Clean Energy Venture Summit included a session on the Utility of the Future, including Roger Duncan from Austin Energy, Robert Howard from Pacific Gas and Electric, Paul Thomas of Green Mountain Energy, Brad Gammon from IBM, and consultant Alison Silverstein. They described an energy Internet or network of energy networks, including addresses for all outlets and devices and robust metadata systems for monitoring and regulation, optimizing overall efficiency. It won't be easy to implement - it's a complicated problem to combine an energy bus and an IT bus for every structure. There's also major load swings we're just beginning to understand, according to Duncan, such as load reduction through pervasive implementation of energy-saving light bulbs and load increase (or shift) as pluggable hybrids start appearing. Howard foresees plugin hybrids serving as alternative reserve energy supplies as well, once we've solved the (not insigificant) problem of energy storage.

It's an interesting time to be a public utility, with the paradigm for the transmission and delivery of utility services at the edge of significant change that, while inevitable, is stalled somewhat by the inherent risk-averse conservatism of most utility companies - Austin Energy and Pacific Gas & Electric are exceptionally forward-looking, already thinking about the relationship of energy to information, advocating for the consumer and envisioning new services, new ways to use energy. They can see the high level need for management, security and monitoring of a pervasive energy network that will offer many new opportunities for innovation - but will also present new risks owing to its complexity and potential vulnerabilities. As they talked about monitoring energy use, I could imagine an analogy to the kind of perpetual-beta, heuristic iterative "Web 2.0" development that is driven by user behavior. Similarly, by monitoring the behaviors of energy consumers, utilities will be able to adjust delivery to optimize efficiency.

Alison Silverstein is not so sure we'll even have utility companies in the way we currently think of them. In the future we can expect to have collaborative, cooperative two-way energy networks where consumers are also producers (another Web 2.0 concept!), producing energy with for home use and feeding some of it back to the grid. There's a notion of interoperatibility, an ability to exchange information and meaning between consumers and devices with little or no extra effort on the consumer's part.

Given the complexity of the transition path, it'll take time and require clear incentives and significant research and development (which is already happening, and which is why entrepreneurs and venture capitalists are joining this discussion). While those who are focused on the energy future seek policies and promote businesses that will make it happen, Roger Duncan says our short term future still depends on natural gas and coal, and an increasing focus on energy efficiency (acknowledging that we waste a LOT through systemic inefficiencies). Wind will be an important source of energy in ten years, and solar (facilitated by better nanotechnology) in twenty.

Meanwhile we need a twofold focus on education: better programs to produce the scientists and engineers who will do the research and development that will transform our energy use, and better public education so that the average citizen shares some of the understanding that was pervasive at this particular conference.

I'll close with a tinfoil flecked peak oil contrarian piece that isn't totally off the mark in some respects, though I wish people would stop confusing "peak oil" with the idea that oil production has already peaked. Its probably 10 years off - but that doesn't mean it isn't going to happen eventually, just that some modellers have underestimated Iraqi reserves in particular and probably those of Libya, Russia and maybe one or two others.

The world is awash with oil. They want you to believe it isn’t. They want you to believe that oil is scarce. The reason for this mindset they offer is that scarce oil is more expensive than plentiful oil. When nations compete for every barrel of crude, the price goes up. Iraq has the second largest oil reserves in the world, and possibly more oil than Saudi Arabia by some estimates. Iraq has historically never been able to get its oil to foreign markets because of interference by OPEC and Big Oil. Saddam wasn’t taken out because we want Iraq’s oil; he was taken out because OPEC and BIG OIL did not want Saddam to flood the market with cheap oil. Cheap oil is anathema to Exxon-Mobil and the rest. Take this into account, The United States still produces oil. The major oil companies own this US oil. When OPEC brings the price of oil up, the American oil companies share windfall profits. There is not much profit to be made on cheap oil; this is one reason why Exxon/Mobil has had the most profitable year of any company in the history of the world. Now does this war become a bit more understandable? Saddam was a maverick in the midst of OPEC. He alone could play with the price of a barrel of crude. The truth is that Iraq has over 500 oil sites in the country and of that, they are only pumping out of 137. They are pumping less now with this war raging.

Now you may understand why the anarchy in Iraq does not concern some nations as much as it should. The longer Iraq is divided and fighting between Iraqi’s goes on at fever pitch, the longer Iraq does not produce oil and glut the market. The reason we went to war in Iraq was not to get their oil, but to stop them from producing oil. Peak oil is a myth. I’ll have to admit it was an idea that I once believed until I found out that the oil companies wrote the report that founded the idea of peak oil. The cold unvarnished truth is that Cheney and his Big Oil friends have manipulated this war from its inception until now, all to increase oil profits.

Now we have a nation drenched in blood. This problem won’t go away until our government really wants it to go away, and at this point in time they are happy with the status quo. American soldiers are dying for Big Oil. The Iraqi’s are dying for a resource that the rest of the world doesn’t want them to benefit from. This war and the reasoning behind it, is one of the most despicable things that the human race has ever been involved in. There are so many people that should be in jail for murder that the number boggles the mind. The truly sad part of this entire mess is that I’m not the only one saying this. The facts are that almost everyone connected with foreign policy knows that what I’m saying now to be true, and they have known it for a long time. How they never believed that the truth would finally come out is beyond me. Maybe they believed that if the truth were to come out that nobody would care. I care, and I believe that most decent people care.

Every day in Iraq, US Soldiers die for oil profits. Iraqi children become orphans for oil profits. Iraqi men fail to return home after going to the market for food and their women and children weep. This scene in Iraq will be played out thousands of times until someday the violence stops. What will be the legacy of this war? Eventually the citizen’s of this nation will understand the depths that some people sank to for profit. I can only hope that it doesn’t destroy the fabric of our nation. The other result will be an entire generation of Iraqi people that remember the United States as the harbinger of death and destruction. They will remember us as the people that savaged their lives. They will remember also, the way that the Sunni’s and Shiite’s killed each other with no regard for Allah, and they will stay bitter. The Sunni will hate the Shiites and vice versa. We will see a flood of terrorists come out of Iraq, bitter and set on vengeance. This will be the legacy of our involvement in Iraq.

Some want us to leave Iraq. I am one of them. I also want the people that caused this war and the people that set the policies after the invasion to pay for their treachery. This can’t be left unpunished. I also believe that we owe the Iraqi people something for their suffering, and that it should come out of the deep pockets of Big Oil. We need a bipartisan task force to look into these allegations. Those with connections to the oil industry should be excluded. We need to talk to the nations that border Iraq and with them, work out the best ways that we can stop this sectarian violence. ...